"We've got bucketfuls of agents throwing players at us. We'll trawl through it." - The PL/CL/EL/world off-season transfer thread '17-'18

are huddersfield still favoured by bookies to finish bottom 3? you'd have thought they'd have wised up by now

they're odds-on with all bookies to go down, the only team to be so

if i was a betting man i'd put quite a lot on their survival tbh, this is complete madness

I don't think Wagner could get a team relegated if he tried. He has an uncanny ability of instilling belief + getting a few extra percent out of players, and then some. No new signings this week, but just as importantly new contracts offered to all the vital promotion squad players, to create wage parity with new mega-bucks in-comings. Wagner has said he hasn't spending finished yet as well.

I haven't been studying the relegation because I don't believe it will happen tbh. But I'm sure someone said we had gone odds against to stay up, might be wrong.

A coupla missing words there!

yeah you're odds-on to go down

burnley, swansea, brighton won't get within ten points of you?

*Historical note

*Hans Frank also had an assistant named Bühler

Brighton just signed Izzy Brown on loan from Chelsea. We already have Kasey Palmer on loan, so we had the option to buy him for £8m if we wanted him, and I think the club rightly decided the price was a pisstake. Our 3-1 against Brighton last season flattered the hell out of them, it was a comprehensive fucking. I respect Burnley, and don't fa about Swansea.

Think Swansea will be alright, the manager seems to know what he's doing. One of Palace or Leicester to start the season in a tailspin and never really recover. Would have said Watford on last season's form but Silva makes them much more of an unknown quantity.

I've missed hoping Newcastle go down last year, so them. Plus Palace/Burnley? Stoke?

Mbappe is worth 180m euros idk what else to say.

I read somewhere that Wenger sees the young Henry in him.

i feel like Stoke are due for the traditional Mark Hughes crash but maybe that's just wishful thinking

nice early start to next season's gaslighting as boss of the richest club in the world:

Asked how he assessed his chances of making United champions again, Mourinho said: “I don’t think we are big candidates for the title but we are candidates. Everybody speaks about the dimension of the investment at Man City but there is another team that I feel the dimension of their investment is also phenomenal – Tottenham. Until now they spent zero pounds, right? They keep everybody they want to keep. They keep Dele Alli, Kane and Alderweireld, they keep Eric Dier, they keep everyone they want to keep.

We had the same budget as Rotherham last season, so perhaps our manager's lack of gaslighting is the reason he is a good fucking manager. Cos he didn't do any of that type of fucking worthless whinging.

God, I hate the premiership already :p

it can't be gaslighting when it's true

Mourinho is an unprecedented nihilistic force in English football. Him joining ManU is the PL's 9/11. Though in a world where Trump is president of the USA, austerity thrives and West Ham pays 28m for Arnautovic, it seems to make perfect sense. We'll regret it when we're burning in hell tho.

Watford, Brighton, Burnley, Stoke, Palace, Swansea(?), West Brom, Newcastle and possibly Leicester could all be in the mix to go down.

Huddersfield 2000-1 to win it is probably a better bet.

Always better wasting a quid on a longshot, than putting a grands onto a bad odds-on bet, I say. Never forget the punter who tried to buy some money with 50 grand on Man Utd at h/t when they were 3-0 up against Spurs, and they lost 4-3.

.....

5-3

oh yeah it was 5-3, it must have been at least 15 years ago that - I was still working in a betting shop at the time.

and it was a reverse, my memory is fucked these days!

We're quite good at blowing 3-0 HT leads. We also managed to do it against a Man City side reduced to 10 men at the stroke of HT.

We once squandered a 5-1 lead against 10 men with 29 minutes to go, and lost 7-6. And that was with the great Shankly in charge!

Tbf we at least signed defoe the day we fucked it to man city

And I was in Paris at the time whereas we were three up against united as I entered the no-phone zone of my grandmother's funeral

To think, she was anointed and consecrated at the very moment the dockyard lizard king hissed "ladssszzzszz itszszszsz Tottenham

It is strange how bad results get weaved into your memories, like yeah that day so and so died, and we lost 4-0 etc...

technically, "lads, it's tottenham" was a pre-game exhortation

sorry for your loss

spurs fans weren't the only disappointed ones that day against man u

please dont go coutinho

if liverpool can't force other teams to sell i don't imagine they'll do the same, unless he's desperate to leave. 80m feels almost worthless to a liverpool who can't even sign players by bidding 80m

Kondogbia lobs his own keeper from the middle of the pitch

https://streamable.com/3io27

Oh wow

lol great touch

Were getting killed out here should be five or six down

just beat full-strength ipswich 6-1

We lost a not very friendly against Udinese, 2-1. It is immoral charging people to watch a disjointed training session type game with a different XI each half imo. But it was live-streamed on the Udinese web site, so they were fully committed to getting a result, if not so much to staying on their feet. MOM was Kevin Lasagna, cue a load of our easily impressed fuckwits googling hilarious pasta puns!

Matic appears to be a done deal

well, it's a midfielder

surprised chelsea would sell to a rival

Conte's making some risky moves this summer. He's moving on two of his most experienced players and replacing them with younger, inferior (right now, anyway) models

Can't say I'm massively enthused by this transfer, mind. But it does give us a very balanced midfield trio

it won't be pretty but he really is building a mourinho team now, between this and lukaku.

I think we can field an entire XI of players over 6ft tall now

surprised chelsea would sell to a rival

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Sunday, 30 July 2017 15:13 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Meow

Inconceivable that Matic wouldn't immediately improve United's first XI, not just adding a degree of defensive solidity and dynamism that's obviously been missing there but also allowing Pogba to play further forward in a position where he might start justifying his price tag.

Re: selling to a rival, by all accounts Matic and Abramovich get on well which might have smoothed the path somewhat.

posted it on the FW thread but this is the biggest move of the summer, imo
http://www.football365.com/news/exclusive-james-richardson-to-leave-guardian-football-weekly

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/jul/31/darron-gibson-disciplinary-proceedings-sunderland-video-comments

When Gibson’s decision to be out in a bar soon after the Celtic loss was raised, he replied: “I might be off my face in here but I still want to play for Sunderland.”

didn't even notice gibson moved to sunderland, could anything be more inevitable?

The outcome

ok new contender for the non-Prem thread title

darron gibson is off his ting